


ripples in all directions

by humanveil



Category: Law & Order: SVU
Genre: Bisexual Olivia Benson, Character Study, Multi, honestly there's not much of anything here, there are zero happy endings here
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-06
Updated: 2019-08-06
Packaged: 2020-08-10 04:29:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 845
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20129368
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/humanveil/pseuds/humanveil
Summary: Ever been in love, Detective?





	ripples in all directions

**Author's Note:**

> flashfic for the prompt combination _love + one thing, six times._ love kind of got more conflated with sex than i’d have liked, but. you know. _flashfic_, so i’m not going to stress about it.
> 
> **warning** for references to stat rape/consensual underage sex (aka the guy in his thirties she was engaged to at sixteen). it’s not graphic or anything so i didn’t think an archive warning was warranted, but lmk if you think otherwise.
> 
> anyway. enjoy! 

**i.**

She loses her virginity at sixteen. 

His name is Andrew and he charms her with a warm smile and a deep chuckle; his eyes on her the entire presentation her mother gives, Olivia dragged along against her will. His hand is cold when it shakes hers, and he’s much, much older than she is, but that didn’t matter to her, then: her mind preoccupied with the way his eyelashes fan across his cheekbones, the way his cologne lingers when he leans to whisper commentary in her ear. The way he makes her feel glad she came. 

He gives her all the love her mother doesn’t, and she falls hard enough and fast enough that she barely has time to think. 

By the time he gets her in his bed, there’s a ring around her finger and the word _love_ strewn across her tongue. 

**ii.**

It’s a year later that she kisses a girl for the first time. A year later where she sleeps with a girl for the first time. 

It’s different than it had been with Andrew. Different because it doesn’t hurt and different because she never grows to regret it. Because this time, it’s with a shorter woman only three months her senior who goes by the name Natalia. Whose touch is tender and whose mouth is hot when she whispers the words, “Amazing, isn’t it?” against the underside of Olivia’s ear. 

It’s not love, not exactly. When she comes, Natalia settled in the space between her legs, she feels more like she’s found religion. 

**iii.**

When she’s eighteen, her mother tells her who her father is. _What_ her father is. It’s slurred: Serena mumbling mostly gibberish as the bulk of her weight rests against her daughter’s side, Olivia’s arm curled around her waist to hold her up. There’s shock and disgust and resentment and denial, and then, eventually, nothing. 

At nineteen, she finds a photo of herself and puts it beside one of her mother; rips a page from a notebook and approaches it like a game of spot the difference. A table is drawn: similarities and differences written at the top of each column, an uneven line scribbled down the middle. Everything she doesn’t recognise she attributes to her father, and then spends the next six years hating it. 

At twenty, she dates a girl who makes it her mission to love her, all of her, especially the parts that Olivia hates. 

All it does is make Olivia hate her in turn. 

  


**iv.**

It takes two years for her to go home with Alex Cabot, but then she does it again. And then again, and again, and again, and again, and again. 

And then it isn’t an option anymore. 

“How long?” she asks, and her heart breaks alongside her voice, and later, when she can look past the grief, she’ll think that it’s a goddamn fucking _shame_, because if the way her chest constricts tells her anything, it’s that they could have had it all. 

**v.**

She sleeps with Dean Porter. 

The first time, not the second time. Even if she considers it; old feelings lingering like a ghost to the family home. 

She never tells him she loves him—had never really been sure of it, herself—but Munch had teased her, once, about the way she lit up when he entered a room, and she thinks that maybe it’s the same thing. 

In the end, it doesn’t matter either way. 

**vi.**

She doesn’t sleep with Elliot at all. Not even when she wants to. Not even when she’s sure that _he_ wants to. 

There’s no dramatic realisation of desire so much as there’s the gradual erosion of denial. She accepts the fact that she loves him in a diner on a Tuesday afternoon, when he pushes a plate of fries across their shared table with an easy smile and a soft, _I know you want to_, and it’s in the very same breath that she understands he probably loves her back. 

It’s years later, when her phone screen says delivered but a response never comes through, that she realises it won’t ever amount to anything. 

**i.**

“Ever been in love, Detective?” 

It’s a casual question, like the response is expected. Olivia doesn’t owe an answer but she gives one anyway. There’s no harm, really: Esther’s not even a suspect—just a working girl she’s interviewed one too many times. They’re past the point of familiar. 

“Yeah,” she says slowly, and a slew of names sit on the tip of her tongue: memories, distant and veiled. She thinks of people she tries not to anymore. Thinks of late nights and coffee dates and lingering touches. How she could never get the timing right. 

“Then you know what it can do to ya.”

The words are followed by a stream of smoke, Esther tightening her coat as she drops the cigarette to the ground. She leaves not long after, heels crunching in the snow, a, _Good luck with your runaway_, thrown over her shoulder, and Olivia is left alone again. 


End file.
